for the forty nine

​

Just as we thought we had attained a state of terminal
catharsis. Nightclub like a radiant fishbowl, the water
inky black and spilling. Grasping at metaphor seems

 

numbing, dumbing down the tragedy into easy pieces.
But metaphor is how I can hope to reconcile this
meteor shower of jagged words and images.

So the club was an aquarium. And no, they were not
fish in a barrel—anything but easy targets.
They were people at the peak of beauty, incandescent-bellied,

furrowed with fishhooks. But we are not chum,
never have been. Being queer and underwater
is making pals with the wrenching pressure

of a submarine descent, each mile another
notched nail into your davy jones suit.
Artery, coral, breathlessness. (Sometimes you come

up gasping upon some bleached reef, unsure of where
the tides will yank you next and you recall how the
authorities couldn’t even slip the syllables off their tongues

correctly.) Watching the story get buried on my newsfeed,
landslide of information rubble. Lives pinned down,
submerged within the dead heft of rhetoric.

Nautilus shell cracked open to reveal an ironclad heart, letting
only a trickle of blood loose. Do not make them martyrs.
Martyrs are hollow, propped-up shadows made to testify

from a place beyond death. I hope they are dancing,
laughing somewhere outside our bickering and reckoning,
and I hope that somewhere is not some final revelation.

Because being gay is being defiant, is grinning
into the full-bodied face of the flood, is vital
as a pulse, a refusal to be emptied.